Army Sergeant Gary Welliver told a reporter that, come to think of it, when Toni met Anthony in Fort Bliss she’d told him she wanted a divorce. “An interesting way to get greeted,” Welliver said sarcastically. Reporters unearthed the unsavory fact that Toni was already married to another man when she married her soldier. She still hadn’t divorced Marcus Butler, Ambere’s father. They also found out by interviewing her cousins and girlfriends that Toni was a restless, disconsolate woman who didn’t love Anthony and didn’t want to be an army wife in the suburbs. Anthony himself had described Toni’s unhappiness in a letter to his mother from the war. “Toni has wrecked my car again,” he wrote Lessie; “I don’t know what’s on her mind.… Mom, I would put my head through the neck of a hot sauce bottle to please her.”
A reader sifting through the details from the papers, now offered up as unimportant true crime fluff, might begin to glimpse the discord in Toni and Anthony’s marriage, how one man was being hurt, one woman stifled, and both were trying to assemble new lives from what shreds of opportunity the inner city provides. Anthony took the legitimate route and joined the army. Toni went the illicit route and arranged a shooting, like the ones she saw around her every day.
But the fact that Riggs was embroiled in familial rancor and fell victim to it held no meaning for the citizenry of Detroit. “What I did, I did for a soldier,” the Reverend James Holley of Little Rock Baptist Church said, referring to his arrangement of the funeral. “What bothers me is that those of us who live here felt one hundred percent the way the media did, that this was the kind of … violence we’ve grown used to.” Reverend Holley did not mean the violence in his community in which women are principal players, as mothers and lovers and sisters and daughters. He wasn’t referring to child abuse, infanticide, spousal assault, or school yard and girl gang aggression. He did not take, for his reference point, the eighty thousand women arrested for violent crime in America the year that Riggs died or the thousands of others whose violence was invisible and went unremarked upon. He meant masculine violence, permissible or illicit, heroic or profane, but publicly engaged in and displayed. “It makes me think I need to take a long look at myself,” he concluded, of his initial assumption about Riggs’s fate. “Have we come to the point that we just automatically perceive ourselves this way?”
What a society perceives about violence has less to do with a fixed reality than the lenses we are given through which to see. Before the twentieth century, the man who beat his mule or his child was not a violent man. Nor was the woman who lashed her dog or, in some eras, abandoned her newborn to die of exposure. Rape is violent, but only in the last twenty years have we perceived that a husband might be his wife’s rapist. The violence that words inflict is newly perceived, and so is the violence of “harassment” and “hazing.” Our perception of violence is selective, and changeable. What the citizens of Detroit had “grown used to,” as Reverend Holley put it, was one dimension of destructive human behavior. Boys were gunning down boys, to be sure. But girls and women were contributing their share to the cycle of rage, and injury, and pain.
Women commit the majority of child homicides in the United States, a greater share of physical child abuse, an equal rate of sibling violence and assaults on the elderly, about a quarter of child sexual abuse, an overwhelming share of the killings of newborns, and a fair preponderance of spousal assaults. The question is how do we come to perceive what girls and women do? Violence is still universally considered to be the province of the male. Violence is masculine. Men are the cause of it, and women and children the ones who suffer. The sole explanation offered up by criminologists for violence committed by a woman is that it is involuntary, the rare result of provocation or mental illness, as if half the population of the globe consisted of saintly stoics who never succumbed to fury, frustration, or greed. Though the evidence may contradict the statement, the consensus runs deep. Women from all walks of life, at all levels of power—corporate, political, or familial, women in combat and on police forces—have no part in violence.
It is one of the most abiding myths of our time.
The notion that women are a homogeneous species of nurturant souls has myriad wellsprings, but the deepest, perhaps, has to do with our basic conception of the body.
Violence, we believe, is implicit in the construction of the male: the chest-beating ape evolved into the soldier, the rapist. Men are propeled into conquest by a surge of testosterone, and build their blocks of power on the strength of their physique. Research may show that women are tougher, longer-living, more tolerant of pain, but research is dry and pedantic. Literature rejoices in the docility of female flesh, its yielding form, its penetrability. The female body fosters life itself. Women do not physically thrust and strut and dominate. To picture women’s aggression, men would have to picture women’s bodies bereft of the erotic, the maternal, the divine. No such sacrifice is required in conjuring male aggression. Muscle and hormone are the twin pillars upon which all our darkest human urges stand: lust, rage, jealousy, revenge, the craving for power, the quest for control. Dark urges, and yet the capacity to express them is also held up as a matter of masculine strength and of valor. “It is highly probable,” wrote Anthony Storr, one of this century’s most famous theorists on violence, “that the undoubted superiority of the male sex in intellectual and creative achievement is related to their greater endowment of aggression.” Masculinity, according to sociologist James Messerschmidt, “emphasizes practices toward authority, control, competitive individualism, independence, aggressiveness, and the capacity for violence.”
A 1996 book about the primate origins of human aggression, Demonic Males, made it clear in the title that, whether we began as creatures of earth or as creatures of God, it is men who wreak the havoc. Men destroy, women create. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. The gender dichotomy is remarkably enduring, and surprisingly crude.
So what is its basis in fact?
Over the last twenty years, a host of scientific research projects have zeroed in on the physical underpinnings of human behavior, with results that pose a sharp challenge to the biological maleness of aggression. Testosterone, the oldest chestnut, has fallen into disrepute of late, as laboratory experiments call the causative effect of the hormone into question. One comprehensive literature review pronounced research to date to be utterly inconclusive on the influence of male hormones on violence. A major flaw in the research has been that testosterone, like adrenaline, increases in people exposed to conflict. The populations most often tested for it are prison inmates, who already have higher levels because of where they are—in an edgy, tense, combative cage. “The outcome of aggressive or competitive encounters,” noted the reviewer, “can increase or decrease testosterone levels.” Elevated levels have been measured in female prisoners, as well as in winners of “a cash prize” in a tennis tournament, recipients of medical degrees, and the triumphant competitor in a wrestling match. “Does the hormone modulate the behavior,” asks psychologist David Benton, “or does fighting and winning increase the release of the hormone?” For all its celebrity, testosterone is an elusive player in this game. It explains nothing, after all, of Toni Cato, or the mother who pummels her child, or the girl in a gang with a switchblade.
In fact, a more compelling culprit than hormones in violent behavior may be the wiring of the human brain, in a way that does not discriminate one sex from the other. There is fascinating work being done on the effect of head injury on the human propensity for aggression. Frontal lobe damage, for example, can cause perfectly calm people to lose their impulse control, which is usually governed by the cerebral cortex. They revert to the most primal emotions, zooming from annoyance to homicidal fury in a matter of seconds, with no mood in between. We know this in its less extreme form as “hair-trigger temper.” Its more voluble expression is called “episodic aggression” or “rage attacks.” But why would it affect only men? It doesn’t. Pauline Mason of Toronto was driving on a highw
ay in 1992 when a spring flew off a transport truck, smashed through her window, and struck her head. She went amnesiac for some months, was permanently blinded, and grew wildly and erratically violent, to the point where her scared spouse initiated divorce proceedings.
How many other women undergo this Jekyll and Hyde transformation? Thousands? The scientific literature is mum. Men are the standard bearers of violence, and masculine violence the measure.
A study released in early 1996 evaluated the impact of lead ingestion on delinquency in children. According to the study’s authors at the University of Pittsburgh, “bullying, vandalism, setting fires and shoplifting” all increased in children exposed to lead-based paints on pipes and plumbing in their homes. The authors cautioned that lead should be considered a serious hazard to children for this reason. But they only studied boys. What about girls? If they’re exposed to lead, what happens to them?
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have discovered that if you breed male mice without the gene that produces nitric oxide—a molecule that allows nerve cells to communicate—they grow up to be the rodent version of soccer hooligans, beating the hell out of each other without provocation. But what do female mice do? The author of the experiment, Dr. Solomon H. Snyder, concedes that the focus of the research has been on males. As he told Natalie Angier of The New York Times, “Not much could be concluded about behavioral changes in females.”
In 1995, research by the psychologist Adrian Raine and his colleagues at the University of Southern California revealed that juvenile delinquents with low heartbeat and sweat rates, signaling sluggish nervous systems, proved more likely to become adult criminals than fellow juveniles with swift nervous system responses. “If you have chronically low levels of arousal,” Raine said, “the theory is that you seek out stimulation to increase arousal levels back to normal.” Raine and his colleagues took the pulse rates of adolescent boys. Who knows what happens to girls?
Biological research has gone down several other trails. Serotonin, a neurotransmitter in the brain, may be related to violent behavior. So might the body’s electrical impulses, since some violent criminals show markedly erratic electroencephalogram readings. Certain irregularities in brain function show up in the magnetic resonance imaging scans of psychopaths, suggesting a severance in the links between emotion and language. Prozac has recently taken some blame for heightening impulses to suicide. And blood sugar levels have been connected to impulsive aggression, most famously in the so-called Twinkie defense, in which the man who assassinated San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk and mayor George Mosconi pled not guilty on the basis of temporary insanity because his depression was deepened by eating too much junk food. Biocriminologists will continue to tinker with the physical mechanisms of horrid behavior and haul their findings into court. But at what point will the exclusive application of this research to men cease to hold?
In primate research, all it took was one scholar, the primatologist Sarah Hrdy, to pose the right questions and challenge the myth of exclusively male aggression. Conducting field research in Africa in the 1970s, Hrdy observed that, in monogamous primates, loyalty was imposed by the females, not the males. “Any prospect of polygyny,” she wrote, referring to the practice of having multiple mates, “would be precluded by fierce antagonism among females of breeding age. In most monogamous species, rival females are physically excluded from the territory by the aggressiveness of its mistress.” Hrdy dubbed this the Hagar phenomenon, a reference to the biblical Sarah, wife of Abraham, who drove her husband’s mistress into the desert. “The basic dynamics of the mating system depend not so much on male predilections”—the mythic hairy ape dragging his female away by her scruff—but “on the degree to which one female tolerates another.” According to subsequent research by Reijo Holmström, female primates also kill one another’s offspring and freeze one another out of feeding groups so that rivals become vulnerable to starvation.
The lesson revealed in this research, as well as in the findings of biocriminology, is that aggression is not innately masculine, but that evidence lies within the eye of the beholder. As long as patriarchs and feminists alike covet the notion that women are gentle, they will not look for the facts that dispute it. Hrdy has suggested that one reason other primatologists continue to assume males are the sole aggressors is that what females do doesn’t look like violence. In other words, one reason women dwell outside the discourse on aggression is because of the tendency of scholars to define aggression in a specifically masculine way.
Regardless whether we assign it a positive or negative value, we tend to conceive of violence as a collection of assertive, public acts: fistfights, bar brawls, gun duels, the collision of soldiers on a field. Violence is the spectacle of teenaged boys beating one another up and mobsters blowing rivals away. It is physical; it is direct. The violent person targets his victim head-on. Pow. Boom. Crack. Defined this way, as in-your-face physical aggression, what we are really talking about is a gendered style. Visible physical aggression is a masculine display, which, many parents insist, shows up early in boys. Scholars who study preschool children, however, find that injurious physical aggression is committed equally by boys and girls. A little girl who has been displaced by a new baby is just as likely to thwack the baby over the head with her juice cup as a boy is. The psychologists Anne Colby and William Danon note that “there is very little support in the psychological literature for the notion that girls are more aware of others’ feelings or are more altruistic than boys.” We all begin our lives as selfish creatures with poor impulse control, out to defend our vital interests as we see them. But what happens to boys at the preschool level is that they begin to engage in much higher levels of “playful aggression” than girls do. What parents are noticing is that their boys have begun to dress-rehearse for gender, engaging in varieties of masculine gesture and display. This sort of aggression, playful in preschool and combative by high school, has nothing to do with the preconditions of criminal motive. It has to do with posturing. James Messerschmidt calls it “doing gender.” Boys play rough because we expect them to play rough. Seventy percent of respondents to a 1968 survey conducted for the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence said that “they believed it was important for a boy to have a few fist fights while he was growing up.” Evidently, most boys do. Every year since 1976, about half of all men in the United States have answered “yes” to the question “Have you ever been punched or beaten by someone?”
“Where I grew up, in Mississippi and Arkansas,” wrote the novelist Richard Ford in 1996, “to be willing to hit another person in the face with your fist meant something.” What did it mean? That you were brutish, power-mad, in love with someone else’s pain? “It meant you were—well, brave …,” wrote Ford. “As a frank, willed act, hitting in the face was a move toward adulthood, the place we were all headed—a step in the right direction.”
Aggressive display is a cultural practice, and even within the United States there are cultural variations in the degree to which men deploy it. Researchers at the University of Michigan recently explored the link between elevated violence rates in the southern United States, for example, and “the culture of honor.” This southern belief, which endures long past the outlaw of duels, is that insults must be met with an aggressive defense. Theorizing that the culture of honor obliges southern men to behave more violently than northern men, the researchers divided a group of students according to where they’d been raised. The students—unaware of the experiment—were bumped in a corridor and called “asshole.” Northerners reacted mainly with amusement, whereas southerners more often got angry. In a second experiment, the students were put on a collision course with the experimenters in the hallway, setting up a game of chicken, to see whether they, or the experimenter, would step out of the way first. Again, northerners were quicker to give way, less inclined to feel that losing the game “damaged their reputation for masculinity.”
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p; British men follow a different model for masculinity. Their ideal is more likely to be “a stolid, pipe-sucking manhood, unmoved by panic or excitement,” admirable for showing reason and self-restraint. In a review of violence rates in Western countries, anthropologist Elliott Leyton speculated that the British rates are much lower because of these cultural ideals. As Leyton points out, certain factors that contribute to the commission of serious violence—individual pathologies, life stresses, childhood maltreatment, and social upheaval—are constant in every society. But levels of displayed aggression fluctuate, according to cultural norms.
What would happen, then, if women felt entitled or compelled to express themselves physically in a public arena, if standing up to fight were not just a manly ideal but a womanly one as well? Would they resist the opportunity because they are not inherently aggressive—neither quick to anger, nor desirous of power, nor keen to brandish their own strength? In fact, the capacity of women to use masculine violence emerges very clearly in those societies that sanction its expression. Anthropologist Victoria Burbank has found that women engage publicly in physical aggression in more than eighty contemporary societies around the world, with other women—their rivals for status, dominance, and resources—the most frequent targets. Like men’s, women’s aggression differs in severity and purpose from place to place. On Margarita Island, off the coast of Venezuela, the anthropologist H. B. Kimberly Cook “found that women are more violent than men in the expression of aggression.” They engage publicly in fistfights and verbal assaults, with “the most common theme underlying fights between women [being] paternity issues” and status. Against men, they use various techniques of “social control,” or what they call “parar el macho,” to quell male machismo. “When I first got married,” one twenty-two-year-old fisherman told Cook, “I used to talk disrespectfully to my wife.… One day my mother took a board and hit me across the mouth. Blood came out of my lip. I cried and said, ‘Mama, why did you hit me?’ She answered, ‘So that you learn respect for your wife.’ “Men are slapped, kicked, hit, and berated, and they don’t see such behavior as trivial or unfeminine. It is a point of pride that, “Yes, my wife knows how to parar el macho.” It is also a point of pride for the women. “A woman’s physical strength and ability to defend herself is … central in the self-concept of women.”
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